The efforts to rein in out-of-control e-bikers who have run roughshod over bicycle decorum and safety — biking on sidewalks, speeding through red lights, and in some cases striking pedestrians — have left the city divided on whether such efforts will do much good or a whole lot of nothing.

One solution, putting license plates on e-bikes, has been bandied about in the city council and the state assembly, to varying effect. 

Last month, the New York City police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, announced the city would start slapping e-bike riders with criminal court summons instead of the standard traffic tickets as part of the city’s new Quality of Life Division. Now, instead of getting a $190 ticket for running a red light, riding an e-bike while drunk or high on drugs; or biking the wrong way down the street,  e-bikers would be forced to appear before a judge in criminal court.  

NYPD cops would be stationed along 14 corridors across the city, including Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where the city has logged the most complaints.

It was, in Mrs. Tisch’s estimation, the city’s first significant effort to improve e-bike safety. 

“Operating any vehicle, including an e-bike, on a city street comes with certain responsibilities. Chief among them is following the very basic rules of the road — and when it comes to traffic safety, compliance is not optional,” Mrs. Tisch wrote in an op-ed. Mrs. Tisch’s justification: Enforcing e-bike safety with “worthless” traffic tickets did little to curb dangerous e-bikers. 

“When vehicle drivers fail to respond to a traffic summons, their licenses can be suspended. But e-bikes do not require any license, so their operators can simply ignore a traffic summons with virtually no meaningful repercussions,” Mrs. Tisch wrote in her op-ed. 

The criminal court summons was the “only real option available under the law to hold reckless e-bike operators accountable,” she added. 

Since taking effect, the NYPD issued 916 criminal court summons between April 28 and the middle of May, dwarfing the 553 it wrote for all of 2024, according to Streetsblog NYC, among the most outspoken critics of both Mrs. Tisch and her new policy. 

Other critics, like Transportation Alternatives, a safe streets advocacy group, have decried it as an “obscene escalation.”

“Giving criminal summonses to bicyclists won’t improve safety. Cars and trucks pose a much greater threat to the safety of pedestrians, yet drivers only receive tickets for the same offenses. Crashes involving people on bikes and pedestrians have killed 11 New Yorkers since 2014, while drivers in New York have killed 1,359 pedestrians since 2014,” the Transportation Alternatives associate director of digital media, Charlie Baker, told the Sun.

In 2023, more than 7,200 people were injured in e-bike or scooter accidents, nearly 500 of whom were pedestrians.

Many worry that immigrants who get summonses could be ambushed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in New York City’s courthouses. “On a time of mass deportation, the mayor and police commissioner are working for President Trump’s agenda of extralegal harassment, detention, and deportation,” the Transportation Alternatives executive director, Ben Furnas, said in a statement.

Under New York State law and federal court order, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot make a civil arrest in or on the property where a New York State courthouse is located, according to the Office of Court Administration. “ICE also cannot make a civil arrest while a person is going to, remaining at, or returning from court unless ICE has a warrant signed by a Judge,” an NYPD spokesman wrote in an email message to the Sun.

Those who show up in Manhattan criminal court reportedly receive a stern talking-to by judges like Michelle Weber, a Manhattan court judge. 

“These violations … [are] a real safety issue, especially for a lot of our seniors,” Judge Weber told one defendant, who was accused of running through a red light, during a hearing Monday that was covered by Streetsblog NYC. 

Now, as the program nears its first full month of operation, many, including those who championed Mrs. Tisch’s e-bike crackdown, say enforcement alone won’t improve e-bike violations. 

“We have a serious crisis, a public health crisis, in New York City, with e-bikes and e-vehicles,” a city council member, Robert Holden, a Democrat from Queens, told the Sun. “I just feel that police enforcement is going to be few and far between. It’ll be concentrated for a short period of time, and then we’ll go back to … ignoring it.”

A more effective deterrent would be to require license plates and registration of e-bikes, Mr. Holden argues. 

Mr. Holden is one of the sponsors of Intro 606, a city bill that would require e-bikes and other e-vehicles to be registered with the New York City Department of Transportation and use license plates. A similar bill, “Priscilla’s Law,” named in honor of Priscilla Loke, a 69-year-old educator who was struck and killed by an e-bike rider in Chinatown in 2023, is under consideration by the New York State senate. The person who hit and killed Loke was reportedly given a red-light ticket for the offense. “Priscilla’s Law” would require e-bikes and e-vehicles to be registered with the state Department of Motor Vehicles. 

“You need some kind of license plate, then you can have the cameras catch them. They get a $50 fine in the mail for every light that they pass or every speed limit that they violate,” Mr. Holden said.  

Another public safety bill, Intro 0060, would ban e-scooters and e-bikes from city parks, ending a program the Department of Parks and Recreation first permitted in 2023. 

A mayoral hopeful, Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, is proposing a new e-bike safety plan that would include making food delivery services like Seamless and DoorDash liable for damages caused by speeding deliverymen. 

“The delivery apps need to be held accountable. We’ve allowed these Silicon Valley companies to go unregulated for years. They’re profiting off chaos on our streets, demanding that their delivery cyclists complete deliveries faster than is actually possible. And so far, New York City has done nothing to rein them in. The city council must pass legislation to regulate the delivery apps so that street safety is prioritized,” Mr. Baker told the Sun.

Criticisms against e-bike misbehavior are often met with the “yes, but cars” defense. Bikes can be dangerous, accidents do happen, but cars are worse. Yet such positions, however right or wrong, sidestep responsibility and overlook the simple fact that it’s the bipedal pedestrian who is most vulnerable to reckless cars and bikes.